I remember an afternoon at Fede e Luce. Two boys spent the whole afternoon playing together: Andrea, who has Down syndrome, and Fiorenzo, who doesn't. That evening, Fiorenzo spoke of the joy he had felt being with Andrea. I asked him about their games, how they played together, surprised that Andrea's difference hadn't come up.
After describing their entire afternoon in exhaustive detail, Fiorenzo suddenly turned to me and said: "But Andrea has something different about him...do you know what?"
Friendship Between Unequals
Aristotle, when he situated friendship within a certain equality between friends, never excluded the possibility of unequal friendship. For him, this inequality lay in education, social station, or age—differences that made friends heterogeneous. Friendship between "unequals" is possible because it is not fundamentally a matter of selfish interest but of the good. It is attention to the other, not an advantage to be drawn from the relationship. [...] Friendship requires recognizing the other as other, as different. It demands that we step outside ourselves and enter into the dynamic and joy of self-gift. [...] Friendship, then, is openness to the other as different from me. It is also an occasion for becoming more fully myself. I step outside myself to move toward the other and become more truly myself in this relationship.Stepping Outside Ourselves
To love with friendship, then, is to dare the encounter—and the difference. To recognize the other, the neighbor, requires stepping outside ourselves and above all outside our roles. In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35), it is striking that those unable to recognize their neighbor are people defined entirely by their social role: the priest and the Levite. If I am locked within my role, it becomes nearly impossible for me to recognize in the person I meet my true neighbor. The neighbor, after all, is not someone who happens to be on my path but someone toward whom I move, myself disarmed and on a journey. Friendship—compassion and true relation—emerges beyond social categories. Precisely because the neighbor is a stranger, met almost by chance at the roadside, he can become familiar to me. To love with friendship is to step outside ourselves, outside our station, to dare encounter what is actually before us, not what we imagine it to be. If there is one person who became our neighbor, it is God himself—the philantropus, the lover of mankind. Jesus loved to call his disciples "friends." When God offers this friendship to all humanity, it is not because of our merits but precisely because of our poverty and vulnerability. "I came not for the healthy but for the sick." God, "though he was rich, made himself poor so that we might be enriched by his poverty" (2 Cor. 8:9). Read that again: enriched by his poverty. So emptying ourselves becomes the condition without which friendship cannot exist. What obstructs true friendship is what we consider wealth. The sense of possession, pride, ownership. Divine friendship becomes the model and the source of all the friendships we create. In this first friendship between God and humanity, all our other friendships will find their shape, their peace, their security, and their truth. Vulnerability and poverty are not obstacles to friendship—they are its foundation. We are not called to a friendship of mutual gain, or a friendship of convenience. But to a friendship of self-gift and shared life. Yves Coppens, the paleontologist and discoverer of the famous Lucy fossil, said what fascinated him most in his studies was the discovery of tombs at the boundary between the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. In them he found skeletons of handicapped people—paralyzed, unable to move or feed themselves. In a nomadic society, these people had been cared for, carried on human shoulders, and fed. They were buried with the same attention given to the bodies of the healthy. Coppens concludes that it is when we take responsibility for the vulnerable that we can speak of the beginning of humanity. If this is true, then our world is in regression, conquered as it is by the triumph of the strong and the exclusion of the weak.The Gift of Time
If vulnerability is the place of our humanity, then friendship must make its nest there. We love what resembles us. And what we share most deeply is our poverty. It is an illusion not to recognize this. Suffering and handicap call for compassion—the first movement toward the other and the foundation of friendship. When we accept this poverty, we enter into relation with the truth of who we are. When we meet at this depth, we become truly one with the other, who is also poor and vulnerable. We discover that we are called to enrich one another, through an exchange of what we are, not what we have. What saves people marked by difference from the tragedy of indifference is friendship. But this relationship takes on a particular and transformative form when the encounter becomes concrete in time and reality. Friendship is not virtual, like on Facebook, but concrete and incarnate. The comedian Gad Elmaleh said it well: "With a computer we all embrace... But when we are face to face we touch hands... from a distance." Friendship is the free gift of time that liberates us from daily rush and gives to the fleeting moment the weight of eternity. When you look closely, friendship is the only attitude that can overcome the inequality between people. Not only does it embrace difference—it makes difference the very reason for communion. Asymmetrical friendship, if I may use that phrase, becomes the model of all friendship. If friendship is too symmetrical, it becomes a fusion rather than a true relation.Welcoming Without Denying Difference
I want to close with one final note from my experience of friendship with Manuela Maria, who has a cognitive disability. This genuine, deep friendship does not exclude an educational role—the role of guarding the truth of the relationship. It falls to those without a disability to set the boundaries of a container, to accept certain frustrations in order to save friendship from what might distort it. This means bringing order to affection so that friendship can become genuine mutual growth in love. This container and these limits, far from being obstacles to friendship, are its very conditions. Welcoming the other as he or she is does not mean denying difference. Friendship is not pity or sorrow over another's fate, but is perfectly clear-eyed, more demanding than the heart would wish, more free and simple than reason would decide. For her part, Manuela Maria sets me free, unblocks me, brings me truly to the spiritual childhood that is my only authentic human dignity. Nicolas Buttet, 2011Ombres et Lumière, no. 179
